, saying, 'Oh,
then you think it will not always be so?' 'Me hope not, missis.' I am
afraid, E----, this woman actually imagines that there will be no slaves
in Heaven; isn't that preposterous now? when by the account of most of the
Southerners slavery itself must be Heaven, or something uncommonly like
it. Oh, if you could imagine how this title 'Missis,' addressed to me and
to my children, shocks all my feelings! Several times I have exclaimed,
'For God's sake do not call me that!' and only been awakened, by the
stupid amazement of the poor creatures I was addressing, to the perfect
uselessness of my thus expostulating with them; once or twice indeed I
have done more--I have explained to them, and they appeared to comprehend
me well, that I had no ownership over them, for that I held such ownership
sinful, and that, though I was the wife of the man who pretends to own
them, I was in truth no more their mistress than they were mine. Some of
them I know understood me, more of them did not.

Our servants--those who have been selected to wait upon us in the
house--consist of a man, who is quite a tolerable cook (I believe this is
a natural gift with them, as with Frenchmen); a dairywoman, who churns for
us; a laundrywoman; her daughter, our housemaid, the aforesaid Mary; and
two young lads of from fifteen to twenty, who wait upon us in the capacity
of footmen. As, however, the latter are perfectly filthy in their persons
and clothes--their faces, hands, and naked feet being literally encrusted
with dirt--their attendance at our meals is not, as you may suppose,
particularly agreeable to me, and I dispense with it as often as possible.
Mary, too, is so intolerably offensive in her person that it is impossible
to endure her proximity, and the consequence is that, amongst Mr. ----'s
slaves, I wait upon myself more than I have ever done in my life before.
About this same personal offensiveness, the Southerners you know insist
that it is inherent with the race, and it is one of their most cogent
reasons for keeping them as slaves. But as this very disagreeable
peculiarity does not prevent Southern women from hanging their infants at
the breasts of negresses, nor almost every planter's wife and daughter
from having one or more little pet blacks sleeping like puppy dogs in
their very bedchamber, nor almost every planter from admitting one or
several of his female slaves to the still closer intimacy of his bed--it
seems to me that